IN the last week, the NSPCC has handed over a petition to the Prime Minister calling on him to ensure the Online Safety Bill is passed sooner rather than later.

The online petition was signed by almost 50,000 people in the four weeks it was active, including more than 3,200 from Yorkshire and The Humber.

In the four years since the Bill was first proposed, the number of online offences has continued to rise. In just the few months since it was last delayed due to this summer's political leadership campaign, Home Office data suggests an estimated 13,000 new online child sex offences were recorded by police across England and Wales. In that time, our Childline service has also seen a 35per cent rise in counselling sessions with children and young people relating to online grooming. Home Office crime data suggests there will be more than 100 online sexual abuse crimes recorded against children every day that families wait for the Online Safety Bill to pass.

The legislation was due back in Parliament last week but was delayed for the appointment of Mr Sunak as Prime Minister and the junior minister responsible for delivering the legislation, Damian Collins, left his post at the end of October. At the time of writing, no new date has been set for it to return to Parliament, despite Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan promising to prioritise strengthened legislation.

We don't believe children and families should be paying the price as the Bill sits in Parliamentary purgatory. Social media is awash with dangerous material that children and young people can easily be exposed to. In some cases, it can lead to suffering emotional and mental anguish, and in other cases as with Molly Russell, it can even contribute to their death.

For too long, we've had to rely on social media firms marking their own homework, but self-regulation doesn't work. The Online Safety Bill would put a duty of care on companies and ensure they put measures in place to prevent and disrupt child abuse on their sites and protect children from harm. We want the legislation to make senior managers responsible for child safety and liable if their sites contribute to serious harm and abuse of children. We're also calling for every platform to have to put measures in place to protect children from harmful, distressing content, not just platforms that have a 'significant' number of child users. We also want an effective watchdog appointed to stand up for children against the power of Big Tech to ensure regulation works in their interests and responds to emerging risks from fast moving technology.